Pumpkin is the New Bacon?

Financial columnist and trend spotter Felix Salmon declares pumpkin the new bacon in this week’s New York Magazine.

But why? What could an orange gourd-like squash and a crispy piece of pig possibly have in common? Why, popularity, of course. You see, everyone likes bacon. It’s salty. It’s crispy. It’s delicious. And it has gotten really popular recently.

You know what else has gotten really popular? Pumpkin! It’s in a lot of stuff–like lattes and doughnuts. But unlike bacon, pumpkin is not delicious on its own. It needs sugar and spice and other things nice (like cinnamon).

“The weird thing about pumpkin’s rise to baconlike ubiquity is that pumpkin, on its own, is not a very appetizing food at all. A dense and stringy fruit, it needs the accompaniment of a lot of sugar and spices before it becomes particularly palatable. As a marketing tool, however, pumpkin is perfectly pitched for today’s eaters,” Mr. Salmon wrote.

It just has good connotations. It’s a semiotic success story. Kind of like….bacon? Sure, why not.